What: Steps for managing the migration of global users to the cloud for e-mail, calendaring, contacts and select documents

Why: At the $5 billion electronics manufacturing company, Patel started experimenting with Google Apps as an R&D project two years ago in an effort to reduce costs. He quickly identified two other benefits in the early successes: increased flexibility in technology, financing of solutions and disaster recovery; and a more robust culture of internal collaboration, beyond just e-mail, calendaring and contacts.

How: After receiving positive feedback on the R&D project, Patel managed a series of pilots on the way to a global deployment for 16,000 users. One of the keys for a successful migration was gaining early executive buy-in. Patel clearly set expectations for the project with the CEO, and made communication a priority for middle managers and the entire user base. Before getting the project fully underway, he worked closely with Sanmina’s legal and compliance teams, and with Google, to allay executives’ fears about moving corporate data to the cloud. With users around the globe, he also had to confirm that the new solution would be able to meet all foreign privacy and security requirements. One of his goals was to make the migration process smooth and pain-free. Users had a variety of training options at their disposal and dedicated post go-live support. In addition, most of Sanmina was able to take advantage of a self-service migration tool, which helped with scalability and enabled IT support staff to focus their attention on the more challenging and special users.

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